Bagels are made by a process which creates a doughnut or toroidal shaped bakery product having a hard outer crust with a distinctive "bagel" taste. Such products are characteristically cut open by slicing them across their width on a plane perpendicular to the axis of the toroid, and spreading cream cheese or the like on them. Because of the hard crust, the cutting process requires a sharp knife which can be hazardous. Avoidance of use of a knife can be done by, instead, tearing the product in half with the hands. Such maneuver is usually awkward and does not result in the desired planar cut. Spreading the cream cheese on the sliced bagel can be tedious, especially when the cheese is cold and has been stored in a refrigerator.
The term "bagel" comes from the Yiddish word "beigen," which means to "bend," and is used to describe a ring-shaped dense, heavy bread roll having a smooth, sleek outer crust and a compact inner crumb. A bagel is made from a yeast dough, which is first boiled in water to close the pores of the dough, then baked in a hot oven to turn the crust golden brown. The dough is worked on a flour board and set in a warm place to rise, then kneaded again before being formed into rings. The rings are formed from balls of the risen dough, either by poking a hole through the center of each ball or by rolling each ball into a long strip, shaping it into a ring and then pressing the ends together. A favorite way of enjoying bagels is to slice them in half, and spread cream cheese on them.
The invention departs from the traditional bagel-making process in that, instead of forming the dough into rings, it is formed into hollow balls with the tops left open. Cream cheese is then put into the hollow center and the ball is closed. The filled balls are then steamed, rather than boiled, and subsequently baked. The resulting product offers the good taste of a bagel, together with the convenience of having the cream cheese already in place.
Bakery products comprising a hollow bread dough, filled with an edible filler are, in general, already known. Familiar examples include jam balls, filled doughnuts and meat-filled dough products. Blanchard U.S. Pat. No. 1,802,698 describes a ring-shaped flour batter confection having an edible filling such as ice cream or whipped cream. Krysiak U.S. Pat. No. 4,251,201 (see FIG. 11) shows apparatus for the preparation of a filled pretzel.
Various ways of automatically filling a dough shell prior to cooking or baking are known. In a typical such procedure, as exemplified by Shinriki U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,334,464, 4,446,160 and 4,515,819, a ball-shaped encrusted bakery product (see FIG. 11 of the '819 patent) is automatically formed by depositing a ball of sticky edible paste material (viz. jam) onto a starch film. Thereafter, a dough sheet is gathered around the ball to enclose it with dough before cooking. In Hayashi U.S. Pat. No. 3,572,259, a vertical tubular extrusion of bread dough crust material and jam or cream core material is cut and formed into two-layered balls without exposure of the core material. Other methods of producing filled dough products are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,794,009 and 4,882,185.
None of the prior art patents, however, mentions the use of cream cheese as a filler, nor describes preparation of the dough skin or crust using a bagel-making technique, i.e., boiling or steaming, followed by baking.